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Why has Donald Trump not released his long form American birth certificate?

On April 15, 2011, I mentioned, in passing, that Trump was not eligible to become President of the United States of America, by reason of:

(a) having been born in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to my friend Mary Anne ‘Bitsy’ MacLeod Trump – a single, unnaturalised Scottish immigrant mother engaged in a bigamous marriage with Donald’s father, an American man called Frederick Christ Trump; and

(b) therefore, being either British or Mexican-born.*

This lead to a flurry of correspondence with lawyers; the sending of a laxative-laced fruit cake which cleared out the entire litigation group of Jarndyce and Jarndyce for about a week and a half; a futile threatening visit from two large men with too many knuckles and Carhartt tattoos (seen off by two randy pugs, a limpy chihuahua and several madwomen with canes and dodgy colostomy bags); the jogging forth from my aged memory of an anecdote about Bitsy Trump’s Christmas party and a quite lovely story in which Donald gets chomped on his ample balls by a pissed off pekinese called Frou-Frou; and further and extensive legal correspondence, culminating in the execution of a Deed under which I promised not to tell you all about the time that Donald was trapped in a steam room in Aspen with Joan Collins and her flatulent Burmese hairless, and Donald made me a small payment of damages that I blew on three weeks in Bermuda, a parking lot attendant named Juan and a kilo of blow.

The subsequent quiet, if uneasy, truce has been sullied only by my bribery of Donald’s maids to slip a few blueberry and ipecac muffins into the breakfast buffet every couple of months.

Just the other week, however, I received a call from my lawyer. He just wanted to note that the deed which Donald and I signed contained strict terms under which neither of us were ever to discuss Mexico or anything that ever happened there, up to and including the very existence of Mexico itself. Interestingly, my lawyer added, the fact that Donald has spent the last few weeks suggesting that all Mexicans want to come here and steal our women and fuck our jobs means, under the old legal maxim feci coram eo feceris,, that I can talk about whatever I damn well want. Read the rest of this entry »

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So, a man is sitting in the park eating his lunch and checking out the local talent, when this old man appears, coming down the path towards the bench where he’s sitting.

Now this old guy is old money, you can tell. The kind of money that bought a dozen very good suits on Savile Row in 1956 and is going to get every damn cent’s worth out of them. He’s a little old gent, well into his seventies, but wiry and strong, all decked out in a tweed suit, a smart green waistcoat, matched silk tie and pocket square, fob chain, and a spotless green homburg — the whole production – and he’s striding down the road like he’s being charged by the foot.

In his left hand, he’s brandishing a stout silver-tipped walking stick, and as he gets closer, the man can see that his other hand is cradling the end of a smallish house-brick which he has tucked into the crook of his elbow. It’s a perfectly nice brick – red, quite new, but with a couple of chips out of the near end. The brick has a piece of bright red string tied around it with a careful knot. The string loops down toward the old man’s knees and then back up, the end clutched in the same hand as the walking stick. The string dances and jiggles as the old man waves his stick at young people and rapscallions.

So he harrumphs up to the bench, stops with a crunch of gravel and an excuse me, young man, dreadfully sorry, do you mind? so the man says, yes, of course.

The old man rests his walking stick up against the bench, takes the square out of his pocket and brushes a speck of dust off the bench, leans over, still cradling the brick carefully with his arm, flicks a few leaves off of a patch of grass in front of the bench, replaces the pocket square and plops the brick down right in the middle of the patch of grass. He looks at the brick, moves it a bit to the right, loops the string around his shoe and tucks the end into his pants pocket, then settles back with a sigh of contentment to survey the view.

Now, the man has just about finished his sandwich, all except the dried up crust at the end, so he looks at the brick and thinks, why not? so he goes would your dog like a bit of my sandwich?

The old man looks round at him and says, I beg your pardon?

Your dog. Would it like the last bit of my sandwich?

I don’t have a dog, young man, says the old gent, his eyes boggling out a little.

Sorry, says the man, I just thought, and he points at the brick.

The old man looks down at the brick in front of him like he’s never seen it before in his life. He says, that, young man, that is a brick. You can tell from the fact that it is a damn brick. Does it look like a dog to you?

Well, says the man, it’s got a string tied around it.

The old guy is up out of his seat now. I hope, he says, that you are not suggesting I don’t know the difference between a brick and a dog? He grabs his walking stick and he’s waving it in the air, big random swings.

It’s all too much for the other man, and he bolts for it, shedding crusts and papers as he goes.

Lawyers all around the country are drooling like a bulldog eying off a cat with no legs at the thought of yet another blistering Scalia dissent on gay rights. So much fun.

As I see it, the Supreme Court should go 6-3 for the right to marry, Kennedy delivering the majority judgment. Marriage fundamental right, laws fail at any level of scrutiny because duh, laws invalid under the 14th amendment, compulsory fuck-you Scalia citation, rousing ending, bing, bang, boom. Where’s the cake and champagne?

I just can’t see Kennedy voting against or going for weasel words to limit the effect of the judgment. The steady advancement of gay rights in the Supreme Court most ensures Kennedy’s place in the history books and (more importantly) the law texts. Lawyers do love to have their name on a precedent that’s going to be cited a hundred years from now.

This is not in any way to suggest mercenary intent. Kennedy’s judgments in Romer, Lawrence and Windsor clearly indicate that gay rights are something he genuinely and passionately supports, and has patiently and firmly worked to expand.

The primary rationale the State [of Colorado] offers for Amendment 2 [prohibiting any laws to protect homosexuals against discrimination] is respect for other citizens’ freedom of association, and in particular the liberties of landlords or employers who have personal or religious objections to homosexuality. Colorado also cites its interest in conserving resources to fight discrimination against other groups. The breadth of the Amendment is so far removed from these particular justifications that we find it impossible to credit them. We cannot say that Amendment 2 is directed to any identifiable legitimate purpose or discrete objective. It is a status-based enactment divorced from any factual context from which we could discern a relationship to legitimate state interests; it is a classification of persons undertaken for its own sake, something the Equal Protection Clause does not permit. “[C]lass legislation . . . [is] obnoxious to the prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . .” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S., at 24.

We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Colorado is affirmed.

The present case does not involve minors. It does not involve persons who might be injured or coerced or who are situated in relationships where consent might not easily be refused. It does not involve public conduct or prostitution. It does not involve whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter. The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. “It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.” Casey, supra, at 847. The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Texas Fourteenth District is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.

As has been noted in several recent District Court judgments which I seem to recall reading or at least dreaming up, if you stir up the “State” and “federal” references in that paragraph and season it with a bit of Loving, you’ve basically written the final paragraph of Kennedy’s upcoming judgment in Obergefell v Hodges et al, et al for him.

It boggles belief that Kennedy would sully his legal reputation by overlooking or distinguishing his own judgments in Romer, Lawrence and Windsor in order to decide that States can go around to gays’ houses and poke them in the eyes with a stick if they ask to get married, not least due to the threat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg calling him a softcock in the lunch room for the rest of his career, and generations of law students thinking he’s a bit of a dick. I’m looking at you, Byron White.

I think Roberts will vote with the majority, because he is a man who always has both eyes, two soft hands and a buffing rag on his reputation. Barring accidents or Tony Scalia going berserko with an icepick, Roberts has another twenty or thirty years as Chief Justice. He knows that freedom to marry is coming, sooner or later, and he’s not going to miss his share of Kennedy’s reflected glory or allow the Roberts Court to hand down a Plessy v. Fergusonesque fuck-you-with-our-state’s-rights to the faggots, which the same Roberts Court is then going to have to overturn ten years from now, when gay marriage is legal everywhere but one or two bumblefuck places like Kentucky and New Hampshire, in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Ginsburg (Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia dissenting) which consists only of the words “Motion granted because Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts are, and were, softcocks.” How embarrassment. How humiliation.

Besides, Roberts has more important matters to devote his attention to like gutting Obamacare and giving corporations the right to vote and bear children.

I’d love to see an RBG concurring judgment consisting of just a ten minute video loop of her reading out the best bits of Scalia’s dissents in Lawrence and Windsor and laughing her arse off, but I suspect she would not want to step on Kennedy’s moment of glory in any way, because RBG is class.

Scalia, to pick a counter example entirely at random, is not class, being, as he is, an arsehole. Scalia is going to be livid. He will rant. He will rave. He will pontificate and huff and puff and slaver about the coming dark days of people marrying hamsters and genderless bathrooms*, until his head explodes. It will be glorious, and a little bit like this:

* I’m not sure how one goes about marrying a genderless bathroom, or indeed any kind of room, but I’d give you fair odds that Brian Brown or Mags Gallagher will be railing against it sometime soon.

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Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald has a very good article on yesterday’s reaction in Australia to the cafe siege.

When I chanced to walk through Martin Place a little after 11am on Monday, I saw the police clustered closely around the Lindt Cafe. I saw the police cordon as I stood among some hundreds of onlookers.

The police evidently had the situation in hand. The crowd was curious, but might as well have been watching a busker for all the tension in the air. Some onlookers snapped photos. Some left as others arrived. The scene was perfectly calm.

It was only when I turned on the TV an hour or so later that I realised the magnitude of our dimwittedness. We were supposed to be terrified.

The Prime Minister led in shaping our responses. He called a press conference but had no information to offer on the incident except that he had held a meeting to discuss it. He took only one question, to explain that he had no details but that the NSW police did.

“We don’t yet know the motivation of the perpetrator,” he said, then freely speculated that he was politically motivated. It was “very disturbing”.

Indeed, the police operation seemed to me (from my vantage point locked in a building five blocks away) to be exemplary – buildings evacuated, police lines erected, negotiators brought in, calm officers on the television (notably, the exceptional Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn) telling everyone to stay calm and get on with their day, a “steady as she goes, freeing the hostages is our number one priority” press conference to end the day, all with remarkable efficiency.

Even the media did a decent job, even if, by mid afternoon, they had run out of people who might have been in Martin Place if they hadn’t missed their bus to interview, and had moved on to showing news stories about who was reporting what. By 7pm, when I got home, they had all been talking for so long that speech had descended into verbal soup. I swear I heard one newsreader (I’m looking at you ABC24) speak a single sentence that managed to mention international news coverage of the incident, the plight of the hostages, hashtags trending on the internet, ISIS flags, how muslims were mostly nice people who thought terrorism was bad, and Barack Obama’s senior security advisor in no more than thirty words. It was very impressive, but terrifying, so I turned it off and watched Martin and Saga find more dead bodies instead.

By tomorrow morning, most of the media will have started removing their pants in order to inspect each other’s fundaments. Yes, sometime tomorrow some dickhead will say something stupid about jihad, or an even bigger (or perhaps just younger) dickhead will make a big man of himself by making fun of some woman threatening society by doing her shopping in a hijab, and a feeding frenzy will begin. There will be hashtags and counterhashtags and burka videos, for and against. Someone will let Jackie Lambie out of whatever box they had her stashed in today and she will say something dumb and racist. Politicians will have serious press conferences to tell us that terrorism is a terrible thing, and how the answer is another filter or letting Scott Morrison poke brown people with a pointy stick.

The idiot with a gun will get, as Mr Hartcher describes it, the overreaction that is the measure of his success.

Hopefully, God (or more likely the skills of those police negotiators) willing, somewhere amongst all that lot, the hostages will walk out to safety.

Whatever happens, the thing that stands out for me is how today was, as Mr.Trowel described it, “quiet and much like any other day” in my office and, I suspect, thousands of other offices and shops throughout Sydney.

After the flurry of texts and calls to friends and loved one had died away, everyone got on with their day. People wandered into to other people’s offices, just to check they were ok, or took breaks together to find out what was happening. Coffee runs were made. The Partners’ lunch stretched to “everyone grab a plate and one piece of bread only”. I had meetings with a couple of very clever young women, and at about 3pm, when the building reopened, most people quietly went home.

I’m not suggesting that being calm in a serious situation is some special Australian trait.

Whether it’s planes flying into buildings, or tsunamis, or bombs on trains and buses, or just a broken gas main, people, on the whole, just buckle down and get on with it, save what they can, offer what comfort they can, and go home for a drink.

Tomorrow, come good or bad news, the media and political circus begins in earnest.

If only we could just leave them to it – get on with our day, be nice to each other, comfort those who need comfort, and go home for a drink instead.

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It has been a while. I have no real explanation. Let’s put it down to ennui (a rationalisation laden with enough cheese-eating surrender-monkey bullshit that we can just pass on and get on with the motley).

When I last spoke to you, we had a Democrat-controlled Senate, we weren’t at war with anyone, the economy was on its way up, and the newspapers hadn’t carried reports of the murder and/or torture of black or brown people by white authority figures for at least a week.

So that’s all gone to shit, and I suspect I’ve built up enough anger to be entertaining again.

What’s your excuse?

Actually, fuck that. I don’t give a shit, because you lot have apparently managed to entirely fuck up the country in my absence.